A Shameful Few Weeks Begs The Question: Where’s Government?

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With the recent crises in the financial world, it’s clearer than ever that we need government to step up and address our problems.

There are certain periods in our history during which one can only sit back and wonder what the limits of astonishment really are. A couple of years since Dodd-Frank first passed, we have come through a period of such disrepute for business that one wonders why the working class has not risen as one — except, of course, because it is exhausted with efforts at reform that seem so futile. We have uncovered many disreputable and perhaps fraudulent business activities, but they essentially represent a failure of government.

Facebook’s initial public offering collapsed in price, leaving small investors holding the bag. Brokers took care of their big customers far better than their small ones. Where was the SEC?

New insider trading convictions, most recently of the widely respected Goldman Sachs director Rajan Gupta, show how rampant trading on insider information really is. The $6 billion losses at JPMorgan Chase by a department that was supposed to neutralize risk showed that trading risk is too profitable to be foregone voluntarily.

And now we find out that LIBOR is incontrovertibly rigged. Some may not realize that Barclays, which agreed to pay a $450 million fine, signed a Statement of Facts that admitted its traders rigged this key rate to make profits on positions, and collaborated with bankers/traders at other banks. Now we find out that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, while president of the New York Fed, was worried and even wrote British regulators about this. That’s nice. But why didn’t government — and Tim Geithner himself — actually do something about it? Are government regulators that feckless?

Of course, there was a certain political advantage in a LIBOR that could be fudged. LIBOR is the rate at which banks lend to each other. It should be nearly riskless, and is therefore used as such in many transactions. LIBOR was the basis, in fact, for up to 100 percent of subprime mortgages. It is often a key input into complex pricing models for securities like derivatives and collateralized debt obligations.

It could be that the Bank of England looked the other way when some bankers, including Barclays’s, lied and said they were paying a lower interest rate than they were in order to make it seem their credit was good. Especially in the fall of 2008, after Lehman’s collapse, governments wanted to calm the waters. Did the Fed also tolerate fudging the numbers?